The 'Al Jazeera effect' and Arab democracy

The 'Al Jazeera effect' and Arab democracy
Lucy Stallworthy
UPI Correspondent
April 12, 2006

BRISTOL, England -- The Al Jazeera effect, or the growing influence of satellite television news on public opinion, has unnerved many autocratic Arab governments, but the information revolution is not a sure-fire trigger of political reform in the region, experts say.

"Democratization is not an inevitable by-product of information and communication technology [ICT]," Emma Murphy, an international affairs expert at Durham University, said on Wednesday at a conference hosted by the Foreign Policy Center, a leading London think-tank.

Murphy's caution reflects a clear shift in academic understanding of the relationship between ICTs and democratization. During the 1980s ICTs were regarded as a means to empower the individual and challenge traditional forms of social organization. There was "a very strong argument that modern information technology changes behavior", she said.

This has been replaced by a skepticism that has emerged from better understanding of the structural barriers to ICT diffusion in the Arab world, where poor telecom infrastructure and insufficient investment have limited access to ICTs.

Indeed, the 2003 Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) found that, "in general, Arab countries have lower information media to population ratios [number of newspapers, radio and TV sets per 1,000 people] compared to the world average".

A sector-specific analysis further suggests that the link between ICTs and democratization in the Arab world is not straightforward. According to Murphy, "the Al Jazeera phenomenon has had serious impact on information reaching to population", but she suggests that ownership inhibits the ability of this media to promote political reform.

Established with a $150 million grant from the Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Doha based channel is a case in point. Al Jazeera's failure to become self-sufficient has resulted in a continued financial reliance on its founder, a dependency that influences programming. "The very close relationship between commercial elites and the royal family means you do not bite the hand that feeds you", Murphy said.

This is endorsed by the AHDR findings. "Authority heavily controls the media discourse, imposing its own topics, directives, values, details, preferences and timings," the report concluded.

Yet despite these issues of ownership, other observers emphasize a degree of autonomy enjoyed by Al Jazeera. According to Rawan Maayeh, project officer for the Foreign Policy Center's Civility Program, "the Qatari Emir has been funding Al Jazeera for sometime but it has had some degree of editorial independence". The channel "has been actively critical of some Arab regimes", she said.

Restrictions concerning the Internet provide a further insight into the complex relationship between ICTs and democratization in the Arab world. Limited Arab language resources - in 2000, 69 percent of all Websites were in English - has contributed to a slow regional embrace of the World Wide Web.

The eventual introduction of the Internet was largely driven by commercial groups with strong links to the ruling elites. According to Murphy, "the Internet came in at the request of commercial groups ... this has given the state a filtering role".

This notion of state censorship of the Internet is supported by Mai Yamani, Saudi Arabia analyst for the Chatham House Middle East Program. "There is a special center with experts from European countries in Jeddah which controls all sites considered un-Islamic," she said.

The barriers of ownership, censorship and unequal access have led Murphy to conclude that there is "no real, hard, concrete evidence of the impact of ICTs on political change" in the Gulf States. However, within this broad analysis, other observers have introduced some interesting caveats.

While she acknowledges that the "link between ICTs and political reform is not so solid", Maayeh contends that technological advances have nonetheless had an important impact on Arab politics. "ICTs are very important for the Arab world from a developmental perspective ... they help build an expectation of pluralism," she said.

According to Yamani, in the Saudi Arabian case, this expectation manifested itself in the reaction to the 2005 municipal elections. Satellite television news coverage means that the Saudi electorate "see that in other Muslim nations, be it Iraq, Egypt, Iran or Palestine, women are voting", she said. The Saudi government has said that women will be able to vote in the 2009 elections.

In this respect, Yamani contends that information provided by ICTs means that the population "no longer accepts the information they receive from the state controlled media". Although the pace of change in the Kingdom is slow, ICTs have "made the people more aware and more demanding of the rights they should have as citizens", Yamani said.